Stephen Hawking
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author (1942–2018)
Stephen Hawking: black holes and a public science voice
From Oxford to Cambridge
Hawking studied physics at Oxford before moving to Cambridge for doctoral research in cosmology. There he worked with Dennis Sciama and, influenced by Roger Penrose, investigated singularities and the origins of the universe. Cambridge remained his academic home throughout a career that connected mathematical questions about gravity with the structure of the cosmos.
A new picture of black holes
His research moved from singularities to black-hole thermodynamics. In 1974 he showed theoretically that black holes should have a temperature and emit radiation, now called Hawking radiation. He became Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1979; the radiation result also sharpened the unresolved question of what happens to information in a black hole.
Books beyond the university
A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, brought cosmology to readers far outside academic physics. Hawking later wrote other popular-science books and worked with his daughter Lucy on children’s stories about space. He left the Lucasian chair in 2009 but continued research at Cambridge, keeping scientific inquiry and public explanation closely linked.